On Mon, 2005-10-31 at 13:13, Merlin Moncure wrote: > > > if that index is causing the problem, you may want to consider > setting > > > up partial index to exclude null values. > > > > This is a single column index. I assumed that null column values were > > not indexed. Is my assumption incorrect? > > > > -K > It turns out it is, or it certainly seems to be. I didn't know that :). > So partial index will probably not help for null exclusion... > > would be interesting to see if you are getting swaps (check pg_tmp) when > performance breaks down. That is an easy fix, bump work_mem.
OK, here's the issue in a nutshell. NULLS, like everything else, are indexed. HOWEVER, there's no way for them to be used by a normal query, since =NULL is not a legal construct. So, you can't do something like: select * from sometable where somefield = NULL because you won't get any answers, since nothing can equal NULL and select * from sometable where somefield IS NULL won't work because IS is not a nomally indexible operator. Which is why you can create two indexes on a table to get around this like so: create index iname1 on table (field) where field IS NULL and create index iname2 on table (field) where field IS NOT NULL And then the nulls are indexable by IS / IS NOT NULL. ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: don't forget to increase your free space map settings
